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Abstract

Recent studies of blood flow regulation at the microcirculatory level have linked the physical characteristics of the arteriolar bifurcations and the physiology of the flow through them to the autoregulatory mechanisms exhibited by the endothelial cell lining. Research in this area is decomposed to the following two components: understanding the biochemical activity that takes place at the cellular level as a result of flow-induced stimulation and characterizing the physical flow behavior causing the stimulation. The following study develops the currently accepted method of characterizing the physical flow behavior, in the form of wall shear stress, through computational analysis. The goal of this research was to improve the computational methodology used for arterial blood flow analysis to predict and characterize wall shear stress. In doing so, all factors introduced by the modeling techniques were analyzed for influence on predicted wall shear stress in order to prove the credibility of the methodology. This process also extended to a characterization of wall shear stress effects as a result of changing model geometry and the physical composition of the blood as a particle-laden fluid, which better represent the physical features of these microcirculatory vessels. The thoughts presented in this thesis corresponding to the development and proof of a revised approach for wall shear stress prediction in arteriolar bifurcations provide a consistent method for the development and evaluation of single factors of the realistic model as they relate to wall shear stress. The goal of this approach was to simplify the computational problem into its constituents and evaluate the wall shear stress influence of each on a singular basis.

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